A Laird for our Times: Questions of Philanthropy and Community in the Scottish Highlands

At root, Wace’s philanthropy, through every aspect of the Tanera project, has become an issue of legitimacy, power and control. The Tanera rhetoric invites community involvement but with unequivocally clear boundaries between a regulated ‘participation’ and actual decision making. Unsurprisingly, these matters are of concern for those who live and work on the Coigach mainland. Of course, such power relations play out on all of Scotland’s landed estates under private ownership, but few of these perform and ‘justify’ their ownership and control through the language of community, of wellbeing, self-discovery, care, of wholeness and of healing. These qualities are not ignoble (or wrong) in their own right, but this essay has tried to raise questions about the context and cultural framework in which they are exhorted and practiced. In many troubling ways this is the ideology, language and culture of the coloniser and missionary who know what is ‘right’ and how people should behave and act. Wace is certainly a passionate secular missionary whose wealth gives him great power to imagine, plan and deliver the present and future shape of the world on Coigach. Perversely, Tanera has colonised the peninsula, a performance of neoliberalism in the ‘wilderness’, a manipulation, perhaps, of local human realities on Coigach. Tenses are important here: has Coigach already become Tanara’d, in the process of becoming Tanara’d or will be Tanara’d over the months and years to come?